 | Trials HD developer spread their own game on torrents |
| LazySAGamer - November 9th, 2009 at 10:00 am - 65 views - 7 Comments |
![TrialsHDoh[1]](http://images.lazygamer.co.za/2009/11/TrialsHDoh1.jpg "TrialsHDoh[1]")
In an interesting marketing strategy the Trials HD developer, RedLynx, decided to seed their own game on a couple of popular torrent sites.
The game they uploaded was fully functional apart from one key feature which were the leaderboards. The idea being that people would become addicted to the game and then go out and buy the version with the leaderboards to compare to their friends.
Unfortunately there are no stats to show whether this idea worked or not but I have more than a little bit of scepticism that it did.
Pirates often try and excuse themselves by saying they are just trying the game and then if they like it they will buy it, well this is possibly the biggest lie out there as their has been surveys and research done into this theory and the cheap ass pirates always come up short.
No matter how cheap the game is the pirates will still rather just steal a copy than actually part with their hard earned money for the game, for some obscure reason they don’t seem to be able to understand that the developers also work hard and would like some reward for their effort.
I don’t know whether to congratulate RedLynx for trying a new way to combat piracy or trash them for giving pirates more excuses for pirating… I can hear them now
“It’s not pirating because the companies put their own games on Torrents for us to try”
Source: Joystiq
Related Awesomeness
The above list was chosen because I slapped the following tags onto this post
Filthy, pirate, RedLynx, torrent, Trials HD
November 9, 2009
12:11 pm
Not sure I read the story on lazygamer or somewhere else, but didnt a company release there game for ‘what ever price the consumer wanted it for’ and it still did well?
November 9, 2009
12:19 pm
this could have come out wrong. i’m not saying pirating is good. i was just wondering…
November 9, 2009
12:22 pm
That I think was World of Goo and the sale was pretty sad if you looked at the real stats. Most people paid less than $5 which was BS and a whole lot of them paid $1.
A few exceptionally loyal people paid 2 or more times the standard retail price that made it look okay
November 9, 2009
1:21 pm
It is called a alternative distro model.
If I made games it would work like this:
Free to DL, Please torrent (saves on hosting cost)
SP is free, MP you buy a code from me to play online.
Simple as that.
Now where is that Bobby chap? I need to have a word with him.
November 9, 2009
1:38 pm
Theoretically it sounds great, now get a bank to give your R70 million to develop a AAA game that you are going to give away
November 9, 2009
2:04 pm
If somebody gives me 70 Mil, I will go away… ;-)
November 9, 2009
2:30 pm
And you can make a bundle with paid for DLC etc…
the current model is retarded, and needs to be reworked.